@patrickklepek

If you've been watching Patrick play Dark Souls on his twitch http://www.twitch.tv/patrickklepek or on his youtube channel https://www.youtube.com/user/patrickklepek you'll see that he's been handling it extremely well.

It's a really cool to watch someone come to this game and pick it up without much trouble. Kudos to you Patrick!

I haven't watched it yet but how much help (if any) does he get from users during streaming?

Yeah, he's been doing very well for his first playthrough. I watched him escape almost inevitable death several times on his last stream. Good for him finally playing through Dark Souls and seeing what it's really about.

I've been enjoying this rash of Souls gameplay videos that have been released recently. Made me start playing Dark Souls as well.

@athadam:

He reads the chat but the majority of the time he's accomplishing things on his own before he reads the chat. Also keep in mind, KNOWING is great but DOING is another thing.

he didn't even look in trouble in that Iron Golem fight

Ohshit, I didn't know he was streaming his play through. This is great!

@tennmuerti said:

Not the entire playthrough, but enough, and mostly around bosses I think. I haven't been keeping up because I also just started Dark Souls, but from what I hear he's been killing it. It was good to see him dispel some of the mystery around that game on the latest Bombin the A.M.

Yep. Vinny's run convinced me to try it, and I got it on a steam sale and have been having a blast. Just having Jeff Green and Patrick to listen to while playing is great.

@beforet: Ah I missed this weeks Bombing the AM and haven't caught up to that yet either. Looking forward to listening to that too now :)

Man, this makes that other thread preemptively whining about his theoretical lack of skill (and everyone who did said whining) look REALLY stupid. I love it. Stupid people.

P.S.

Patrick is good at games.

But Dark Souls is nowhere near as hard as people like to think it is.

Unless you are incredibly dumb.

The guy does play Spelunky and Monster Hunter. I figured he'd be good at a game with slow character movement that requires split second thinking.

I've been quite impressed with what I've seen. Definitely did better than I did when going through some of those areas. In fact, he seems to be having more trouble with spelunky than dark souls from what I can tell.

Watching (or listening in my case) to Patrick play has been heartbreaking; not because he's good but because I'm also listening to Jeff Green's playthrough and the difference is night and day. Sure Jeff is funny, but man, Patrick is already caught up to him and he did it in a third of the time. That's... man.

The real test is coming up soon, though. I'm really curious to see how both of them handle Smough and Ornstein; especially since both are outright dismissive of summoning for jolly cooperation.

Hmm weird. It's almost as if Dark Souls isn't anywhere near as hard as everyone says it is.

No, it's not really that hard. It just has a huge learning curve. Repetition and learning from mistakes makes it easier over time.

you people crack me up.

The only people that talk up the difficulty of Dark Souls are people that have never played the game.

I've watched the videos Patrick has uploaded to his channel, but his run last night was the first time I saw it live. He's been chewing through the game at a rapid pace, but it looks like the Harpies actually got him to rage a bit. He died quite a bit during his fight with the Stray Demon, but he was mostly calm during his deaths. The Harpy Death Grab got him to crack a bit.

I was glad that he read my advice on the stream about mashing his way out of the grab attack. I was really hoping he'd reach Priscilla during that stream, but the Harpies put an end to that. If he pops in this thread he should know that he can mash his way out of other grab attacks (Mimics and the forest Treants).

@skooky said:

Innnndeedly. It's not exactly what I'd call an easy game, but the legend doesn't at all match the reality.

To be fair, going in completely blind would be a much more daunting task. Patrick's prior knowledge, and the vast amount of knowledge out there, is making this go a lot more smoothly than it normally would. But at the same time, if you keep level-headed like Patrick, many of obstacles that Dark Souls lays down for you can be easily conquered.

Is Dark Souls an easy game? No. Is it an impossible game? Definitely not.

Patrick has trouble against human opponents though :)

I would say the hardest part of dark souls is not knowing where the next bonfire is and running pass it. I did that countless times in sen's forteress and the marsh of blighttown. Patrick found all bonfires on his first run and that's a little suspect. I mean, good on him for cutting through most bosses without breaking a sweat but I bet he dodged the hardest part of the game by glancing at a walkthrough or looking at the chat just at the right moment.

I think the "legend" of the game's difficulty has to do with the initial, assumed Dark Souls experience: at launch, before everything was meticulously catalogued and every body had an inescapable grasp of what the game is all about. Not to take anything away from people playing now, just saying that it's easy to forget that Dark Souls has been out for two years and how much it has infiltrated the industry / taught us.

Dark Souls isn't hard, so skill is relative.

@fistfulofmetal: And KNOWING is half the battle!

@canteu: that's the worst thing I read. Dark souls is hard, but it forces you to be good.

@legion_: Well I and a lot of other people don't find it, and never found it hard. Just like a lot of modern video games.

@scheds said:

Not to mention that the 1.5 patch took away a lot of difficulty. To be fair to From they rebalanced a lot of things to make it more fair (humanity drops were effing scarce before hand), but it's easy to forget that the game was more than a bit different when released in comparison to the PTD version.

Dark Souls just brutally punishes your mistakes. There are some instances of cheesy mechanics (Bed of Chaos fight) but in most cases the game is fair to the player. If you died then it's likely due to a mistake in your gameplay (i.e., pulling too many mobs, not having shield up, attacking with low stamina, etc).

He seems to be alright at the game, not amazing or anything though.

To the "Dark Souls is not hard" people: did you beat the game dying less than 50 times? That's a pretty high number of deaths for any game that isn't a platformer. It's not as hard as something like Vagrant Story where you can straight up do no damage if you're playing wrong but it's still pretty tough and easily the second or third hardest game in the 3rd person genre. Something like NGS or NGS2 or Bayonetta doesn't even come close. If you didn't play Demon's Souls first I'd be surprised if you beat it dying less than 100 times, though it's not unheard of.

Note: It's possible to do better if you look up a build, that build happens to be sorcery, and you summon as many people as possible to aid you; but all of those are pretty game-y solutions and you'll probably still wind up dying a substantial number of times in the process. Blind runs are what counts.

Finally decided to pick this up after watching Vinny and Patrick play it. Despite the back and forth about it's difficulty, I still feel it's kind of a "right of passage" for a gamer to play this through.

I made a statement in chat (Smoothrunes is my Twitch alias) that I would give Patrick $50 if he can beat Ornstein and Smough 1st time and 25 if it is on the second try and I am sticking to that. Hope you're on your best game, Scoops.

Patrick has had some first-hand as well as quite a lot of second-hand experience with the game, playing up to the Taurus Demon way back when and watching others play (Vinny comes to mind) here and there. Add to that the fact that every last detail of the mechanics of the game have long been figured out and written about to a ridiculous extent, which translates into a very "backseaty", yet usually well informed live audience in the chat - plus maybe the rebalancing that has happened through patches -; yes, I also do not think the difficulty of the experience Patrick is having right now can quite keep up with the "original".
However: Patrick is still doing extremely well. It is really quite something to have the more advanced techniques and timings down so well so early in the game. The Iron Golem was never the toughest boss in the game, but holy shit: First try with the Lightning chopstick, without actually pummeling the guy? Pretty impressive to me. I was nowhere near this good on my first playthrough.
Can't begin to imagine what a cakewalk this would be for him if he'd be less "careful" about upgrading stuff. Then again: Doing ridiculous amounts of damage can lead to a far more carefree playing style, so maybe he'd be better of sticking to fast-roll and dex-weapons throughout.

And then, of course, there is Jeff Green. :)
He really went in pure (as in: completely unprepared) and his advanced age really wasn't doing him huge favors in picking up the intricacies of the gameplay mechanics fast. But look at him now! No match for youngster PK, maybe, but has this man come a long way, or what? He still dies a lot, sure, but it's so satisfying to see him overcome hurdle after hurdle after hurdle.

Odetta and Moron have to meet up at some point!

But we should all keep in mind that they have yet to reach the toughest parts of the game. Famous duo O&S are actually still a ways away and they both haven't even gotten past those god dang archers yet. Then there is Ariamis. The four kings are waiting. The archives are no joke, either. The dlc ... Lost Izalith can f one up, too. Good times ahead, still.

It highly depends on what version of Dark Souls you're playing. Vanilla Dark Souls was considerably harder than the game we're playing now. Via patches, the amount of souls you get was increased a great deal (more than doubled essentially), some enemies were nerfed (the aggro range of the Lost Izalith butts was decreased), etc. etc.

Also, when you've watched videos of people playing Dark Souls for years, you kinda know what to do and how to approach the game.

@cptbedlam: Yarr... I kept journals of my first run through Dark Souls in October 2011; I suppose it would have been much different otherwise. There was a fair amount of information out there on Demon's Souls by the time I played it (mid 2010) but I still managed to do most of that blind so I merely assumed people would be so daring/willing in Dark Souls (Patrick seems to be relatively close).

Looking back: I did catacombs before Blighttown! Good thing I had Astora's at the time.

A nice quote regarding becoming a white phantom: "I had felt a bit sad about my mediocre performance of the previous day, but nothing cures sorrow like the failure of others."

Patrick is generally good at video games.

Yeah, he is doing a really good job, and it's pretty brave to play through that game for the first time in front of a public audience who have mostly already completed it at least once. My first play through would have been ripped to pieces by that chat.

Ultimately, I'm just glad they are finally playing the damn game.

Patrick is doing way better than I did on my first play through, but I think I'm slightly better than Jeff Green. It's funny how bummed out he gets from invasions though - however he did just kill an invader but there wasn't much challenge there (the invader just stood there).

Either way I'm just happy there's so much Dark 'n' Demon's Souls lately.

Watching Patrick in Anor Londo yesterday reminded me of when @rorie did that area. Good times.

This is making me want to go back and play the DLC that came out since I played it, but knowing I would have to replay the first third-ish of the game again to get to it is really holding me back.

Also, the bit of props to Patrick I have is that he is better than average. But man, sometimes he has a really bad memory and can be really blind to things (the number of times he's walked past some stairs or something and starts hitting walls wondering where he's supposed to go is really frustrating to watch).

I'm working through the YouTube archives, when does he stop trying to run past enemies?

I know it eventually happens because I watched some of the stream when it was live and he was playing much better.

Heh, I wonder how long its going to take him to figure his way out of the painting.

Brad was kicking butt last night on Demon's Souls too.

Watching his latest video, he killed that Iron Golem with ease. I love that he's playing the PC version, watching the other versions from Brad or Vinny, the graphics are not as sharp. He's my favourite Bomber anyway, and he delivers the most content so it's nice to see him play an action game and show how good he is generally.

Don't forget that Jeff is playing it in windowed mode, which makes it easier to miss small details. I suspect there'll be a huge jump in Jeff's competence once he gets a computer that can run it fullscreen while streaming.

@fredchuckdave: While I am on your side on the point that Dark Souls at it's core is a hard game despite the completely overblown reputation. I can't really agree when it comes to Ninja Gaiden. Those games are a magnitude more punishing and difficult to play just on a mechanical level than Dark Souls where you can kinda scrape by just with min/maxing and knowledge over mechanical skill. In NG you HAVE to be good at the game, and it is NOT easy, even when you know what needs to be done.

Bayonetta isn't especially difficult though, unless you are doing pure platinum or infinite climax mode.